August 23, 2016

The "Coal Giant" is Peabody Energy. The political consultant is Joyce Aboussie, who wrote to Huma Abedin:

“Huma, I need your help now to intervene please. We need this meeting with Secretary Clinton, who has been there now for nearly six months,” Aboussie wrote. “It should go without saying that the Peabody folks came to Dick and I because of our relationship with the Clinton’s,” she added.

Dick is Dick Gephardt, who was House Majority Leader from June 6, 1989 to January 3, 1995 and House Minority Leader from January 3, 1995 to January 3, 2003. That is, he led the Democrats in the House of Representatives during the entire Bill Clinton administration. Gephardt started a lobbying firm in January 2006, the month he left office.

Gephardt ran for President in 1988 and 2004, and he was considered a strong candidate for VP in 2004. There was even a New York Post cover saying that John Kerry had picked him:

“It should go without saying that the Peabody folks came to Dick and I because of our relationship with the Clinton’s,” she added.

Huma must have rolled her exotic eyes and thought "what kind of amateurish influence peddler so consciously violates the rules of pay to play omertà?"

I imagined her rolling her eyes over something else — the illiteracy of "to Dick and I" and "the Clinton's." In my hypothetical scenario, she's saying:

How stupid is Peabody to pay big money to a guy who can't avoid making rank grammatical errors and sending them to me? To me! It's one thing to be married to a man who impulsively sends dick pics to skanky women, but to craft to-Dick-and-I email and send it to me! Ugh!

The supply and demand for corrupt favors in DC is a free market provided to Play you must Pay Bill and Hillary through their designated intermediary. Then Bill figured out how he could cut out the intermediaries big commission by putting the bribe arrangers on the payroll of a "Charity" Foundation. No wonder the Server had to be private so it could be wiped clean.

There may be an interesting situation with the remaining "missing" e-mails. It is assumed - but not certain - that a number of intelligence agencies have them. So if you are one, should you release yours or wait to see if one of the others will go first? What if you really are the only one? Decisions, decisions.

The pressure on Hillary! must also be something. Even if she thinnks she has the official agencies covered, domestic and foreign, what about the unofficial ones? What about the Edward Snowdens?

Peabody Energy is in Chapter 11. Billions in equity has been destroyed. The payoff didn't work.

Here's the other side of the racketeering scheme that Bill and Hillary run. It is a PROTECTION racket. Some bribe money is paid for positive official acts. Other protection money is paid so that the government doesn't undertake official acts. Protection.

We don't know what Peabody Energy wanted from Mrs. Clinton but it well could have been to stop something like the Clean Power Plan. Demand for coal dropped and that was driven by new regs enacted by Obama. If the regs don't get implemented then demand stays up. No BK.

The Clintons run a classic racketeering organization. Bill learned about it in Arkansas. An early RICO came out of AK: US v. Moody and Anderson.

Just remember folks, blatant corruption, selling of public influence, bribery, and pay-to-play is what Hillary is offering the country. That's her feature, not her flaw.

Any Democrat will tell you that Harding got an unfair reputation because of the Teapot Dome scandal, after all. "Why was that scandalous? Isn't government supposed to be a way to shovel taxpayer money by the bucket loads to your friends and yourself? That's the entire point, right? Money for you and power over the peons?"

That's the way it starts. Use of the nominative rather than objective case, a misplaced apostrophe, and then, pretty soon, you're neck deep in vice and corruption and dangling participles.. Good morals start with good grammar.

Sebastian said..."Gephardt started a lobbying firm in January 2006, the month he left office." But, but, I thought lefties wanted to get money out of politics? So disappointed in lefty Dick, man of the people.

8/23/16, 7:49 AM

But they do, they get a LOT of money out of politics! Don't be disappointed.

I wouldn't say that Gephardt had worse hair than Edwards. Edwards' hair was silkier, but Gephardt had decent enough hair. It was a trifle thin, but in an age appropriate way. I do notice, however, that it was somewhat orange. How did Gephardt spend so many years in public life without being relentlessly mocked for his orange hair. I guess back then people were more tolerant of orange hair........Perhaps Edwards' silky hair worked against Kerry. When you stop to think about it, Kerry's crowning achievement is his hair. Very few men reach his age with such full, abundant hair. Edwards' hair upstaged Kerry's hair. When they were on stage together, you were much more likely to notice Edwards' hair than Kerry's.

You credit Huma and Hillary with too much intelligence. Huma and Hillary did not keep their email server both secret and unhackable. If one is running a multimillion dollar bribery scheme, spend what it takes to keep it private.

@DB: "Huma and Hillary did not keep their email server both secret and unhackable." Right. Of course, we are treating these people as agents, as if Hill could make an informed decision about "servers." Sure, she and Bill wanted to keep their email as private as possible, away from FOIA/Congressional prying eyes, but otherwise had no clue about technology or security. By the looks of it, they hired amateurs. Insofar as real calculation went into it, they assumed that they could get away with whatever they did: they would not be held accountable for evading actual requirements or exposing secrets. Since the likely costs were low, the benefits outweighed them. In the end, the nuisance costs were a little higher than anticipated -- mainly because they anticipated the whole scheme staying secret, and it came out only inadvertently and too soon -- but on the most serious costs they calculated right. WH, DoJ, SoS, FBI -- they had the system on their side, and they knew it.

The grammar and punctuation errors bother me very much. It seems many educated adults these days cannot correctly use the English language.

At a back to school event I filled out a web form on which four of my daughter's teachers collaborated, and it included the sentence "Is there any other thing's you want us to know?" These are the school's best and brightest, who teach the gifted kids. Sigh.

Yes, I was That Mom who corrected it. Someone had to uphold some standards.

Speaking of Huma, she apparently published articles for her mother's jihadist magazine, some of which blamed the US for 9/11. http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/08/21/hillarys-top-aide-huma-abedin-articles-blaming-usa-911/

That's the thing that makes no sense. There were *no* benefits. If she had just used the State Department email for the dry official stuff and kept the shady stuff separate, there would be no issue. She could have been just as corrupt as she wanted and still have a nice FOIable official trail that wouldn't matter beans.

Normally Democrats are a bit more subtle about their pay to play. Hillary is just more crude about it than most -- kind of like Chicago in her shakedowns

Yeah, I'm not going to be naive and think stuff like this didn't happen with other Secretaries of State, but come on! There isn't even an attempt to make this appear kosher. I can't believe this woman is going to be President. This is worse than Spiro Agnew.

Juan Williams, one of the liberal tokens on FOX News, said that no granted favors had been proven. I think there will be some proven but, even if not, are the 'donors' not feathering her nest on the assumption of her being POTUS?